Breadcrumbs

Category: Summer Jones

The final week has been quite hectic. After finally getting hold of adobe acrobat, a software which allows you to make interactive PDFs, I have gone back to working on…

Task 1: Academic Plan

Getting to grips with the software was hard. But, generally, most of the problems I was having, others had also had, so Google could help me out. (Tech aside: Acrobat allows you to add javascript to the PDF, but it’s a bit weird getting your head around how it works).

What I ended up creating are PDFs, one for each year group, which allow students to see what grades they need to achieve at the end of each school year in order to be on track for their chosen career.

Since my last post, lots has happened. In fact, time has flown by and I can’t quite believe it’s my final week.

Alongside my projects, I have been helping to organise one of our coaching sessions for sixth former’s at a local law firm. Normally, we train students to be our coaches but in this unique case, we have trained lawyers. The students seem really keen and this week they were having speaking on Skype with all kinds of professional experts as part of the program; solicitors, aerospace engineers, robotics engineers, graphic designers. The program has been a real success.

Task 2: Coach Quiz

Over the past couple of weeks I have steered away from task 1 as I awaited the decision to purchase the necessary software.

Future Frontiers is a charity which trains up undergraduates to become careers coaches for pupils in high school and sixth form. The coaches run an 8 week programme for an hour a week with the pupils and guide them towards having a clear career goal in mind. Midway through all of this the children speak to professional experts, via Skype, and ask them questions about the career they are considering. The programme has caused a great increase in academic progress for the majority of participants.

At the end of the programme the pupils and coaches produce what we call an ‘academic plan’ which outlines what the pupil has to do academically to reach their dream job in the future.